Quotes About Time

My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear. In a world of randomness and surprises, it's a technique I've developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnameable sense of dread. I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up. It's my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality.

It is, unfortunately, easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time.

at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as, 'the self-satisfaction felt by busy men - however idiotic their business - at not having time to do what you are doing'.

Time abbreviated itself, like an accordion that is lived in extension but remembered only in contraction.

When I consider … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me ['l'infinie immensité des espaces que j'ignore et qui m'ignorent'], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? Pascal, Pensées

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

I think of literature,' she wrote, 'as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started to late. I will never catch up.

Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.

I libri non sono un passatempo. Parlano di altre vite. Di altri mondi. Altro che far passare il tempo, Sir Kevin; non so cosa darei per averne di più.

I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.

Stava scoprendo che un libro tira l'altro; ovunque si voltava si aprivano nuove porte e le giornate erano sempre troppo corte per leggere quanto avrebbe voluto.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

At eighty, things do not occur; they recur.

Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess

Stava anche scoprendo che un libro tira l'altro; ovunque si voltava si aprivano nuove porte e le giornate erano troppo corte per leggere quanto avrebbe voluto. Ma era dispiaciuta, e anche mortificata, al pensiero di tutte le occasioni che si era lasciata sfuggire.

Pass the time?' said the Queen. 'Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

I think of literature,' she wrote, 'as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.

The king is up. You attend on the king, not on the clock. When the king is awake, you are awake.

It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch...the field would make a good Brideshead-like beginning for a film: as it is now and as it was then...'There is nothing I would want to alter or improve. Unattended to, disregarded (though it's grade 1 listed) it is just as the past should be.

What Oxford gave me was time,,,I was supervised by someone whose passion for the subject, his care for his pupils and his moral rigour I have never forgotten and whose example has stayed with me all my life.

Passar o tempo? - disse a Rainha. - Os livros não são para passar o tempo. São sobre outras vidas. Outros mundos. Longe de querer que o tempo passe, sir Kevin, quem nos dera ter mais. Se quiséssemos passar o tempo, íamos à Nova Zelândia.

Considero la literatura (...) como un vasto país hacia las fronteras del cual viajo, pero a las que nunca llegaré. Y he empezado demasiado tarde. Nunca me podré poner al día.

3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one's movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?